Twenty years! Presto, what a change! Rip Van Winkle has awoke! Where stood the lonely hovel, now stands the commodious and comfortable farm house. Orchards, barns, granaries, flowers, luxuriant foliage, pure water, broad fields of grain and grass, lowing herds, good roads, schools, churches, neighbors, friends, cheerful and smiling faces, happiness and contentment have replaced the former surroundings. The poor and dejected emigrant is now the independent possessor of a domain a prince might envy. The disconsolate and almost broken hearted mother who, during long and weary days and nights, in solitude and loneliness, watched and nursed her puny and sickly brood, is now the happy, comely and dignified matron, whose children and grand-children are clustered around her. The friends and kindred with whom she parted so sorrowfully twenty years ago—those of them who are yet spared to earth—are again her neighbors. With them she frequently exchanges visits—from fifty to sixty hours only, at most, being necessary to bring them together. If Old Rip had actually gone to sleep, twenty years ago upon the prairies, upon awaking now, it is opined, his amazement would far exceed that inspired by the neighborhood of the Catskills. Who will now complain of the hardships incident to a removal from the most favored regions to a country, already so far advanced in all that contributes to the comfort, enjoyment and embellishment of life?
On the 6th August the world was astounded by the announcement that the Atlantic Cable was successfully laid. Previous failures had left no hope in the minds of any, even the most sanguine, of such a result. The short, laconic, simple dispatch of Mr. Field—the world renowned projector and master spirit of the work—flew with lightning wings throughout America and fell upon minds, where skepticism for a long time repelled and resisted conviction. Slowly the possibility of its truth gained the ascendency over disbelief and doubt, till at length, the amazing reality of the achievement began to be comprehended. The dispatch to his family of Capt. Hudson, of the United States' Steam Frigate Niagara, from which the cable was laid, was telegraphed over the country and dispelled all doubt. That dispatch, beautiful in its epigrammatic terseness, and sublime in its devout thankfulness and gratitude, will be carried down the coming centuries, as long as the remembrance of the great feat shall survive. "God has been with us! The telegraph cable is laid, without accident, and to Him be all the Glory. We are all well." In its first efforts at comprehension, the mind utterly fails to grasp and measure the terrible sublimity of Niagara, the awful majesty of Mont Blanc, or the colossal proportions of a vast cathedral, which
"Defy at first our nature's littleness,
Till, growing with their growth, we thus dilate
Our spirits to the size of that they contemplate."
So with the Atlantic Telegraph. The mind is bewildered and baffled when it undertakes to contemplate either the consequences which are to flow from it, or the simple extent of the cable, and the mysterious regions which it traverses.
Far down along the groined and vaulted caverns of the Ocean's bed; along the slimy pathway, strewed with the wrecks of sunken argosies, their treasures darkling in oozy dungeons, and the forms of their once living, breathing, human freight, stark and ghastly in eternal sleep; along rayless and gloomy depths, where silence and solitude, profound and supreme, unending and eternal, encompass, pervade and encircle as with an atmosphere; along submarine alpine peaks, vainly struggling upwards towards the regions of light and warmth; beneath where the storm Fiend rides on the billow's crest, where the tempest howls the hoarse refrain of its anthem, and where sweeps the ice berg, congealed, perhaps, when the morning stars first sang together; stretches a metallic thread no bigger than your finger, uniting lands two thousand miles asunder in bonds of harmony and brotherly love; along which glides a subtle fluid, conveying thought and intelligence—those mysterious emanations of the human brain—and writes them in distant lands as rapidly as they are engendered. A thought is born, and instantly it is stamped upon a human mind two thousand miles away, across the pathless waste of ocean! A human heart beats, and its throb is felt before the blood returns for another circuit. A word is spoken, and it is re-uttered before the sound has died upon the ear of the first speaker! A question is asked, and its answer comes back as the shuttle returns with the woof! A boon is craved, and the heart leaps in exultation as it is granted, or sinks in despair as it is denied, almost as soon as the lips have closed upon its utterance! Stupendous achievement! Is there no limit to the conquests of man over the forces of nature, tangible or invisible? Shall he yet find means, by the clarity of his messengers and the invincibility of his power, to overtake and reclaim the lost and wandering Pleiad, and restore the fugitive to its celestial companions? Shall he go on, step by step, into the shadowy realms of the Impossible, until he shall claim affinity with Supreme Intelligence? Shall he advance, in the order of progressive creation, until he shall be developed in a being more nearly allied to Ultimate Destiny? Shall the curtains which conceal the arcana of hidden knowledge be gradually drawn aside, and his eye rest, with unflinching gaze, upon the secrets of the Infinite? Thoughts like these crowd upon the brain, stupefied and amazed by the announcement of an event, more wonderful, as a triumph over Nature's obstacles, than was ever proclaimed since the world began.
CHAPTER XII.
Early Settlers in Vicinity—Early French Settlements—Buffalo Rock—Chronological glance at Illinois—Black Hawk War—Indian Creek Massacre—Cork War—Murder of Story—John Myers—Ninawa Titles—Col. Kinney—A. H. Miller—Starved Rock—Deer Park—Sulphur Springs.